ȘTEFAN BACIU AND THE MELE MAGAZINE AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL OF GLOBAL LITERATURE

Abstract

This article examines Mele, the magazine edited by the exiled Romanian writer Ștefan Baciu, published from 1965 to 1993 in Honolulu and distributed free of charge. Described as an “international poetry newsletter,” the journal was produced in an artisanal manner, with a limited print run, yet it featured contributions from contemporary writers and visual artists drawn from a wide range of cultural and geographic contexts. Baciu’s chief aim was to create a network of writers and artists that would cross linguistic, political, and cultural borders. Mele printed poems in roughly thirty languages—including translations—and its pages brought together both established figures such as Octavio Paz and Carlos Drummond de Andrade and emerging, exiled, or otherwise marginalized poets. By operating outside the logic of the publishing market and the dominant cultural centers, Mele built a desterritorialized literary space and fostered a kind of transnational “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) grounded in intellectual affinities and friendships. In this sense, the magazine can be regarded as an alternative model of global literature, promoting a form of resistance to literature as a “big business” and positioning itself as a polyphonic, multilingual, and transcultural poetic universe.